Author: Hayley Scanlon

The Kirishima Thing (UK-anime.net review)

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thekirishimathingThis is from a million years ago but it was caught up in the queue at UK-anime.net and has only just been liberated! Also I wrote this when I was deathly ill (festival fever is a real thing!) so I’m not entirely sure it’s completely coherent. Anyway, have at it – The Kirishima Thing reviewed at Uk-anime.net

What’s up with that girl, why is everyone crying?

Must be the Kirishima thing again, right? It’s got everyone all riled up.

Hey, what exactly happened with that? Where is Kirishima?

You didn’t hear?! Kirishima quit the volleyball team! And nobody’s heard from him since, doesn’t answer calls, doesn’t answer texts – he’s in the wind….

Damn, man, that’s cold! Wonder what happened….

What happened with Kirishima, why he’s upped and quit the volleyball team quite suddenly right after having been made captain and with the team on course to win a big championship actually turns to out be almost totally irrelevant. We may speculate on why someone might just do that but we can never really know. What is important is that Kirishima’s unpredictable action causes a seismic wave to rip through the social structure of his class. With Kirishima gone, everyone else starts to question their own place in the social hierarchy – are they really where they want to be, where they ‘belong’ within the all important high school pecking order? Some threaten to move up and others down but will anything be the same ever again?

The ‘cool’ kids are in the ‘going home’ club or possibly ‘in a sports team but blowing off practice’, the next level are ‘kind of in a club because it’ll look good on my application forms (it’s not like I like it or anything)’ and then at the bottom we have the geeky guys and girls who are really into their club activities – exemplified here by the downtrodden film club. When Kirishima just quits and effectively demotes himself from the A crowd by quitting the volleyball team nobody’s really certain of anything anymore – what’s cool, what’s not, what do I care? The volleyball team feel betrayed by their captain’s absence, the cool boys are puzzled and uncertain without their leader to look to, the popular girls doubt their status now the alpha guy isn’t around and the film club….carry on as normal and try to ignore all the silly drama going around the school.

However, there are those in the higher echelons who maybe feel they don’t belong there. One of the cool girls has a secret liking for ‘geeky’ films but is frightened of becoming ‘one of them’ and losing her ‘popular’ status. Another girl, nominally one of the cool girls both hates and admires her friends for their vacuity and refusal to see whats going on around them. She is the only who really sees what’s going on everywhere, but even she too is afraid of losing her position. The most troubled and changed though is Hiroki, Kirishima’s ‘best friend’ who nevertheless didn’t know anything about his friend’s decision. Half in half out of the baseball team, he’s trapped between the cool world of the going home club and the slightly less cool one of being able to do something very well. The only people who aren’t really affected are the film club who are, to some extent, too invested in their own sense of inferiority to really notice what’s going on everywhere else.

The film club  are in some ways the heart of the film as they both refuse to see and ultimately document the social fracturing that’s going on within the school. They seem to think themselves very hard done by -‘they’re always winning’ complains one boy after they find a location they want to use already occupied and later ‘I won’t cast them when I’m a director’ about the annoying popular clique who’ve just been laughing at them loud enough for them to hear before they’ve even gone past. However, they are the key to the film’s climactic roof top confrontation scene as the film club’s high school zombie invasion movie is rudely interrupted by the popular kids’ desperate search for Kirishima. This leads to a day of the dead style zombie fantasy sequence as the film club zombies devour the unwitting volleyball stars and popular girls which is the highlight of the film. The intermingling of the two groups which would never normally have anything to do with one another finally forces the ramifications of the Kirishima thing to come to a head. In some senses it clears the air; the tensions have boiled over and worked themselves out. However, for some the outcome is far from clear and they remain trapped between levels of high school cool.

The Kirishima Thing is certainly not for for those who like a lot of action, zombies aside, or something with a heavier plot element, but as an ensemble character study it excels. As an allegory for the wider problem of conformity/social norms vs individuality and self recognition in the adult world it’s certainly a very apt parable but all of the characters concerned are very well drawn and each afforded a degree of sympathy and understanding. The Kirishima thing strikes a more realistic tone than the director’s previous films (Funuke: Show some love you losers!, Perfect Nobara) which took place in a world of heightened reality but still has a strongly comic tone. An extremely nuanced and layered tale, The Kirishima Thing may require multiple viewings to completely appreciate but it’s certainly well worth the investment in time.

Also look out for fellow queue inmates Kumiko the Treasure Hunter and Tale of Iya which, I am assured, will shortly become eligible for parole.

Nobi: Fires on the Plain (野火, Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

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86485840228b9d174ae44b6a189f8c0bIt’s a fallacy to think Japan doesn’t make war films. Or perhaps, more that they didn’t make them until the recent swing to the right in Japanese politics seems to have made it OK to make Hollywood style war movies. Up until the sixties, Japanese cinema was willing and able to engage with the darkness of the recent past and several wonderful films such as Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (Ningen no Jouken 人間の条件) or Okamoto’s The Human Bullet (Nikudan 肉弾) not to mention Ichikawa’s own The Burmese Harp (Biruma no Tategotoビルマの竪琴) presented the still fresh sorrow and regret associated with Imperialist ’30s onwards. None of them, however, come close to the hellish world of Fires on the Plain (Nobi 野火).

Based on Shohei Ooka’s novel of the same name, Fires on the Plain begins with the beleaguered conscript Tamura (Funakoshi Eiji) being berated (at length) by his commanding officer for returning from the field hospital earlier than expected. Despite having been given five days food, Tamura has returned after just three days because the hospital refused to admit him. Sick with TB, Tamura is told the hospital feels its duty is to the battlefield wounded – not those who’ve been unlucky enough to catch a debilitating and often terminal condition. Of course, his CO doesn’t want him back either – with only so many resources left and staring defeat in the face, why waste food and effort on a man who can’t pull his weight and is probably going to die anyway. And so, Tamura is sent back to the field hospital with no additional food and instructed to wait there until they let him in or alternatively, there’s your grenade – isn’t there? Do the decent thing. Thus begins Tamura’s bleak odyssey into the depths of human depravity, trying desperately to survive in the unforgiving Philippine jungle.

Legend has it that Funakoshi was so dedicated to the part that in true method fashion he’d been living on a starvation diet prior to the film’s starting and in fact actually caused it to be halted almost immediately when he collapsed from severe malnutrition. That might in part explain his miraculous performance with vacant, staring eyes like someone whose soul has gone somewhere far away. His halting and confused speech, understanding and not understanding, desperate to survive but terrified of what he might become – Tamura has no choice but to keep on walking, trying to find something to cling on to. Everybody knows the war is lost, yet there’s nothing they can do but keep on fighting. Tamura even considers the unthinkable – surrender, but another soldier beats him to it and is promptly mown down by a machine gun wielded by a Filipina resistance fighter working with the Americans. The most pressing problem is the lack of food. There is very little to live on left on the island which has been well and truly wrecked by every side. You can steal food from the indigenous people (if you can find any) or there’s ‘monkey meat’. The great taboo – cannibalism. Ultimately Tamura decides sometimes the price for survival is just too high if you won’t be able to live with what you’ve done.

In the west, particularly in the US, the film was criticised for its ‘sympathetic’ portrayal of Japanese soldiers – that it was another instance of Japan ‘playing the victim’ which was a common American reaction to the more contemplative war films of Post War Japan. It is true, the films glosses over the immediate situation of the Japanese occupied Philippines though the film largely takes with the Japanese on the run from American troops and the Philippine resistance. The fact there have been atrocities is never directly addressed though it hangs in the background like a grim, guilty spectre. It might explain why Tamura’s early meeting with a pair of villagers who’ve made a stealthy visit to their abandoned home to retrieve a parcel of salt buried under the floor becomes so fraught. In the first instance, Tamura was foolish to enter the house and approach them – even his disordered mind he must have known it was very unlikely they’d react kindly to his presence. If he just wanted to know what was buried under the floorboards, he had only to fire a warning shot and scare them off before they could dig it up and then retrieve it himself. When he does show himself the male villager runs off but the female is so scared she can barely move and can’t stop screaming. Tamura shoots her and takes the salt for himself. Disgusted with his actions he throws his rifle into the nearest pond. That isn’t to say the film lets Tamura, or indeed the other men or the whole Japanese war machine, off the hook. Only that they’ve become this way because of what war reduces you to – less than animals, surviving by any means even if that means betraying your fellow men.

Fires on the Plain was adapted from Shohei Ooka’s novel of the same name by Ichikawa and his screen writing wife Wada Natto who, while keeping broadly to the tone and spirit of the book, made several changes. The most obvious being to the structure of the novel which has more of a framing sequence, an unreliable first person narrator and a complicated structure. In the novel Tamura, a fictionalised version of the author, is a Christian and the book is written with a Christian view of the world rather than the traditionally Japanese viewpoint common to the majority of soldiers. Therefore, Ichikawa decided to remove the Christian themes from the film in order to present Tamura as more of an everyman though the Tamura of the book is presented much more ambiguously. This also explains the changes to the film’s ending which is bleaker and less forgiving that than that of the novel.

One of the most horrifying depictions of war ever put on screen, Fires on the Plain lays bare the true horror of warfare. Trapped in a sort of purgatory, forced to wander the jungle waiting for the inevitable yet desperately clinging on to life, Tamura’s story can’t be described as anything less than hellish. Wading past corpses, mud, blood and those who’ve already gone mad – this is humanity at its lowest point. Even if you meet another soldier, they can’t be trusted – it’s every man for himself. Ichikawa’s world is bleak beyond belief with no hope in sight, the only possibility of salvation lying in the large fires that appear at distant points along plains. Everyone assumes them to be a signal of some kind but nobody knows what they mean or for whom they are intended. A descent into hell, Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain is one of the most realistic and most powerful anti-war films in cinema history.

Fires on the Plain is unavailable in the UK but is available in the US from the Criterion Collection. Shohei Ooka’s book is likewise unpublished in the UK but is available in English in its original 1957 translation by Ivan Morris currently in print from Tuttle in the US though it should be noted that Morris’ translation is itself heavily edited. 

 

Moebius (뫼비우스, Kim Ki-duk, 2013)

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pXQzqHE - ImgurKim Ki-duk’s latest reviewed at uk-anime.net.

A Moebius strip is a twisted loop with no beginning and no end. No matter where you start your journey, you could pass the same point many times without ever crossing a boundary. It this inexorable and infinite cycle to which Korean auteur and professional cage rattler Kim Ki-duk now turns his unfaltering gaze as the ancient wheel of sex, death and violence trundles on untroubled by our modern day pretences of a more enlightened society. Completely dialogue free, Kim presents a contemporary greek tragedy framed as the blackest kind of satire.

Things are not going well in this quietly suburban, middle class household. It’s not even breakfast time but the father has retreated to his study because the mother is already perched on the stairs, a large refilled glass of red wine in hand and all while the bemused teenage son looks on disinterestedly. This is a normal morning, nothing has changed very recently. Things are about to change though – quite drastically. Finally at the end of her tether and filled with a Medea-like fury the mother decides to put an end to her husband’s philandering days by means of a kitchen knife. She is extremely drunk and half crazed so her husband easily disarms her at which point she comes up with another idea – if she can’t hurt her husband himself, she can cause him pain by proxy and takes her knife to her unsuspecting son’s room. Literally emasculated by his mother, the young son must then face difficult questions regarding the nature of his masculinity, particularly as it appears to others. His father in turn must cope both with the guilt of his own sins being visited on his son as well as that of his own behaviour as a father, husband and finally a man. Never one for easy answers, Kim Ki-duk’s examination of modern day Korean society continues apace but its implications are far more wide reaching.

Though Kim is firmly focussed on his native Korea, the questions he presents are as old as the hills and common to almost every culture (at least to those that also male dominated). It’s not the first Korean film where the successful father is having an affair with a girl young enough to be his daughter, or the first where the wife’s humiliation spills over into violence but the nature of her revenge is so specific, and perhaps bizarre, that it brings its own particular line of discourse. The first question is one of traditional masculinity and how that is defined between men. The son seems to feel emasculated and looks for different ways to explore his manhood but is at pains that no one should discover the nature of his injury. Though he approaches the woman who had been his father’s mistress (played by the same actress who plays the mother), he backs off when she reaches for his genitals. Later, he makes an attempt to step in when she’s being hassled by a gang of dangerous looking youths but quickly subjugates himself to them and, when they do actually gang rape her, pretends to join in rather than stand up to them or have them think he is less than a man.

The fact the object of his adolescent lust is both his father’s mistress and looks eerily like a younger version of his mother is another ancient problem where, as they say, everyman kills his father and beds his mother. The father’s first reaction to his son’s predicament is to look for ways someone without a penis might experience orgasm – the answer he comes up with also speaks volumes and points to another of Kim’s ideas of circularity, that pain and pleasure aren’t so much linear poles but a circular continuum where both can exist equally at the same time as a sort of self feeding vortex. The second idea he has is a penis transplant, and as the boy’s is no longer available he makes the ultimate decision to sacrifice his own source of pleasure in favour of his son’s. Unfortunately, it comes with some sort of homing device which means it only works with the mother (perhaps her ultimate revenge). The relationship between father and son changes again as they become rivals in an incestuous love triangle only now it is the father who has become impotent and the son, literally, the man of the house.

If you think this all sounds a bit ridiculous (is a penis transplant even possible?) you aren’t wrong, and Kim Ki-duk knows too. Odd as it might sound, Moebius is a comedy, even if a macabre one. Sexual violence, incest, penis theft – not traditional comedic ingredients it has to be said but Kim Ki-duk’s very definitely of the it’s better to laugh than cry school of thought and the sheer scale of Kim’s vision gives the entire project the sort of absurd grandiosity that makes it very difficult not to find humour even the bleakest of situations. Kim isn’t proposing any answers here so much as offering a series of (critical) observations of human nature. The world isn’t going to change just as it hasn’t changed since Euripides first started telling stories of people driven to the edge of madness. We’re all walking on a Moebius strip, repeating the cycle endlessly completely unaware that, at some point, we began walking on the other side. Like the best Greek tragedies, Moebius is has a feeling of inevitability driven by the most primal of emotions. Once again Kim proves he’s not afraid to look deep into the dark heart of human nature and, though not for the faint hearted, Moebius is one of his most accomplished films to date.

 

Behind the Camera (뒷담화: 감독이 미쳤어요, E J-yong, 2013)

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fullsizephoto273825Review of Korean meta documentary style comedy up at UK-anime.net

When Korean director E J-yong was commissioned to make a short film as an advertisement for Samsung, he thought to himself what a wonderful idea it would be if he could test modern technology to its limits and direct the film remotely from a hotel room in LA. In particularly meta touch, the script he’s designed for the film also features a Korean director remotely directing a film the only difference being that the fake director is doing it because his overseas girlfriend is in town and he’s trying to avoid having to choose between love and money. Like E’s previous film, Actresses, which got some of Korea’s most talented actresses together for a fashion shoot where they proceeded to trash talk the industry and each other, Behind the Camera is fiercely funny behind the scenes style mockumentary where the lines between reality and fiction are anything but clear.

As the film begins, some of Korea’s best known talent has been assembled for a preliminary meeting regarding the short film they’re going to be making over the next two days – only there’s one very important person who doesn’t seem to have arrived yet. Coming as a surprise to some, the producer then stands up and makes an announcement that this film is going to be a little different, in fact the first of its kind, as the director will not be present on set at any point during the shoot but will be supervising from LA via Skype! Some members of cast take this better than others, especially as they lose wireless contact almost as soon E starts trying to explain the nature of the concept. Predictably, some don’t even believe he’s really in LA at all just engaging in a elaborate practical joke but others regard the whole thing as a farce and vaguely insulting to their status in the industry. As time moves on, the crew gradually start just ignoring E and doing their own thing and it’s clear one or two of them have their eyes on the director’s chair. Can you really direct a film from half way across the world and still realise your vision in the same way you would if you were really standing on the set? What’s more, is the idea of a director in itself anything more than vain conceit if all you do is say ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘cut’?

In the wrong hands, films with this sort of conceit can go horribly wrong. Often too clever by half, anything with a meta construct has a serious risk of ending up on the wrong side of pretentious but it’s clear that E J-yong’s intentions are a world away from any such self aggrandisement. Essentially a bolted on companion piece to his Samsung commercial (what a fantastic use of time!) what E has crafted is a warm and witty backstage look at the movie making business. Completely unafraid to poke fun at himself as the director with a high concept who may or may not be in Hollywood trying to make in America like his friends Park Chan-wook, Kim Ji-woon and Bong Joon-ho (now he’s made a film in Hollywood even if it wasn’t a Hollywood film), Behind the Camera takes what could be a fairly thin joke and unpacks it in such a witty fashion that it easily sustains itself over the course of a full length film.

Like Actresses, Behind the Camera assembles a whole host of Korean cinema talent with actors, actresses and industry personnel mostly playing themselves. Some of the funniest moments in the film occur when the cast and crew are just hanging out together and chatting generally about various things. Yun Yoe-jong had taken a brief break from filming Im Sang-soo’s A Taste of Money in order to take part in this mini-project as a favour to E who hasn’t even bothered to turn up! In fact she originally told him she was too busy but after he sent her a depressing photo of himself begging her to star in his film she gave in. If anyone has earned the right to a few salty and spiky retorts after such a long and illustrious career it’s certainly Yun Yeo-jong and witnessing her intense displeasure with the entire endeavour is one of the highlights of the film. There are also plenty of meta references to the Korean film industry and cinema history for those who are well versed enough to pick up on them.

At first glance, Behind the Camera might sound like one of those precious industry “mockmentaries”  that are never quite as funny as they think they are, but Behind the Camera is different precisely because it isn’t afraid to turn the camera around and expose what really goes on backstage. You genuinely can’t tell what is ‘real’ and what is ‘constructed’ but what is certainly true is that Behind the Camera’s warm and humorous outlook make it one of the funniest Korean comedies of recent times.

 

Cold in July

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cold-in-july-quad-posterBased on Joe R Lansdale’s novel of the same name, Cold in July is an homage to classic ’80s neon tinged noir with a noticeable digression into Southern Gothic, revenge thrillers and B-movie heroics. Small town Texas picture framer Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall) is woken by his wife one night after she begins hearing strange noises from downstairs. Fearfully arming himself with his father’s old pistol hidden in a shoebox in his wardrobe, Richard tiptoes downstairs only to find a masked and hooded figure standing in his living room. In a halted moment Richard confronts the intruder with the gun and, hands shaking, uncertain what to do next locks eyes with the would-be burglar now held motionless as if in a tractor beam. As Richard holds his course, the mantlepiece clock begins to strike and whether accidentally or in panicked terror the gun goes off sending its explosive charge into the scenic landscape hanging on the wall by way of the burglar’s right-eye. The police arrive to find a traumatised Richard near catatonic in disbelief but oddly seem fairly congratulatory – “it must have been difficult, for a man like you” his Sheriff friend tells him, with heavy implications. Assured that it’s legally self defence and nothing further is likely to come of the matter Richard tries to return to his previous small town, family man life but the incident has left him jittery and with a noticeable ambivalence toward firearms. However, despite what the police may say it’s not quite over yet – the burglar had a father, and a psychotic one at that. An eye for an eye as they say, or a son for a for son – only, that’s not quite it either and before he knows it, Richard finds himself involved in a complex circle of crime and conspiracy.

Cold in July lines itself up with those late ’80s slightly sleazy, hyper violent crime thrillers in which one ordinary man must face off against some kind of larger danger which threatens the very foundations of his world. The period detail is exact with the book’s 1989 setting recreated faithfully down to every last detail from the bizarre red neck haircuts, giant portable telephones and floral furniture craze to VCRs and vintage 80s Apple Macs. The look has an appreciably 80s vibe with heavy grain despite having been filmed on digital RED cameras and the Carpenter-esque synth score give it the air of something that could have been made thirty years ago. Like all the best 80s small town crime stories there’s the melancholy and oppressive feeling of something not quite right, that there are no safe places and even in these cosy little towns there’s a great festering wound that’s rapidly turning rotten.

Like its ’80s settings, these are some old fashioned ‘heroes’ who display an unabashed adherence to ‘traditional’ ideas of masculinity. Richard is a mild mannered picture framer – work that requires skill and artistry rather than physical strength. After Richard shoots the man who threatened his home, the town’s reaction is less fear or sadness but almost joyful respect. “We didn’t think you had it in you” seems to be the general consensus from everyone from the local postman to the glowing write-up in the local paper. Before he was an emasculated husband and father, but now – having killed, he’s a man. Real men shoot first and don’t bother with questions at all. Despite Richard’s discomfort with his actions, with the reaction to his actions and even his own lingering feeling of inferiority he can’t escape the fact that something that he sees as weakness is being held up as heroism.

These old fashioned macho ideas are clearly something that continues to be passed from father to son – something that Richard begins to worry about when his own son playfully points a toy gun at him. The two older men – Don Johnson’s Jim-Bob the private-eye-cum-pig farmer and would be vengeful father Russell (Sam Shepard) are veterans of the Korean War and come from a generation steeped in conflict in which men are judged by their physical strength and survival techniques. Richard appears to have had some kind of strained relationship with his own (presumably deceased) father as though he keeps his gun in a shoebox at home, he seems pained every time the subject comes up. Russell hasn’t seen his own boy since he was a child and feels he’s failed as a father and perhaps as a man (in so far as a man is duty bound bring his son up right). What Richard learns from them is a lesson in old school masculinity – you carry the gun, you put things right. There’s an archetypal idea of chivalry there, that you stand up and protect your own and that the sins of the son are also visited on the father who must atone for failing to prevent such transgressive behaviour. There is something noble in it, but it is also dangerous – can a man who’s taken care of business, even in the name of his community, really return and live amongst other men?

Genre-busting as it is, the Cold in July mostly keeps itself together even as the action threatens to descend into the ridiculous. A thin stream of black humour helps to paint over its excesses as does its sheer joy in the larger than life elements such as the improbable Jim-Bob’s gaudy red cadillac, stetson hat and penchant for cool one-liners. There are undoubtedly a host of plot holes to the extent that it might be better to just avoid thinking about the sequence of events as a whole – the most obvious being a glaringly obvious loose end that everyone seems to have forgotten about. To be fair, no one leaves The Big Sleep shouting “yes, but who killed the chauffeur?”, a few potholes here and there don’t necessarily ruin the road and Cold in July is not a film about its plot. As an exercise in style, Cold in July excels but it also manages to pack in enough social commentary and primal melancholy to give its old fashioned morality tale some weight. Its politics maybe unpalatable and its outlook distinctly 1950s but Cold in July is among the best of recent retro exploitation B-movie throwbacks and walks its own path with considerable assuredness.

Wings of the Kirin 麒麟の翼

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Wings_of_the_Kirin-002Based on the novel by Keigo Higashino (The Devotion of Suspect X), Wings of the Kirin is the latest big screen outing for Higashino’s famous detective Kaga. Previously played on TV by Hiroshi Abe who reprises his role as the much loved sleuth here, this latest instalment sees Kaga’s particular expertise put to use in the case of a salary man who appears to have staggered some distance from the subway tunnel where he was stabbed only to die right under the famous Kirin statue on Nihonbashi Bridge. Around the same time, a younger man calls his girlfriend to tell her he’s in ‘big trouble’ before being chased out into the road by police, whereupon he’s suddenly mown down by an oncoming truck. As this man had the salaryman’s briefcase the case seems open and shut – a mugging gone tragically wrong leading to the death of both perpetrator and victim. Kaga though feels differently and as always, the case is not quite as straightforward as the authorities would like to believe.

As with many of Higashino’s stories, the mystery itself is almost a macguffin as Higashino is more interested in investigating human behaviour and psychology with half an eye on traditional morality. Wings of the Kirin is no different in this respect as it has a heavy interest in the relationship between fathers and sons and the importance of taking personal responsibility for your own transgressions. However, that isn’t to downplay the mystery element as Higashino once again proves himself a master at wrong footing the audience. Many viewers may feel they have a pretty solid idea of who did it and why fairly early on the film only for it takes off in an entirely different direction in the final third. That said, although it is heavily pushing your intuition in one direction, there are perhaps an over abundance of subplots including illegal work practices and unfeeling employers, the difficulties faced by young people coming out of the foster system, complicated teenage friendships and misunderstandings brought about by people’s own sense of guilt. Consequently the film does run quite long as it manages to pack in just about as many wrong turns and red herrings as possible, however it largely earns its right to run as each of the characters and sub-plots manages to be compelling in its own right.

Though Wings of the Kirin is technically the big screen spin off of the Detective Kaga TV drama, no previous knowledge of Kaga and co is strictly necessary though familiarity with some of the peripheral characters may help. Hiroshi Abe excels once again as the slightly distant if all seeing detective who alone is capable to putting all the pieces together in the right order. Perhaps due to its TV roots, the film has a rather strange and quirky soundtrack which is frequently at odds with the serious nature of the drama yet it never quite tips over into being distracting enough to derail the film. Occasionally it does feel like more like a big budget TV special than a major feature but again perhaps that’s in keeping with the previous instalments in the series. Like all good mysteries, the solution involves a great deal of improbable coincidences yet watching Kaga shuffling them all into place to reveal the overall solution is quite masterful.

However, Higashino’s moralising does take over at times and there was at least one instance where it seemed Kaga had gone too far, or at least the actions of one character did seem reasonable. After all, if you can ‘save’ one person when there’s nothing to be done for another, is it really so wrong to try and help the people who are left behind? The actions in that case did seem altruistic, not born of any desire to ‘cover-up’ wrong doing but only to try and prevent more lives being ruined. Yes, Kaga’s assertion that you’ve effectively taught someone that it’s OK not to admit you’ve done wrong or that it’s OK to let others take the blame for your own mistakes is obviously true, but the consequences here are perhaps too extreme and dramatically neat to bear it out. Occasionally the film does feel preachy and its message is anything but subtle, however, thankfully it never manages to disrupt the pleasure of its finely constructed mystery. A little bit long and necessarily meandering, The Wings of the Kirin is another impressive crime thriller from the pen of Higashino that manages to entertain with a finely crafted central narrative but is also unexpectedly moving in its curiously small scale climax.

Library Wars (図書館戦争, Shinsuke Sato, 2013)

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Based on a series of light novels by Hiro Arikawa, Library Wars is another adaptation of a popular multimedia franchise from the director of the live action Gantz movies. Like Gantz, it’s another bug budget, tentpole style block buster with a subtle (though not insubstantial) desire to inject a bit of social commentary into what can be an entirely trivial genre. The manipulative forces at play here, however, are far less mysterious and unfortunately much more plausible than the mysterious black orbs of Gantz as they come in the form of crypto fascist censorship enthusiasts known as The Media Betterment Force. Having achieved the kind of success Mary Whitehouse could only dream of, The Media Betterment Force managed to pass the Media Betterment Act in the alternate Japan of 1989 which required all books containing ‘objectionable’ material to be destroyed. All is not lost though as the last bastion of intellectual freedom, the library, takes up arms and defends its right to disseminate whatsoever information anyone might desire with a government mandated assurance that library property can be safeguarded – with military force if necessary. Thirty years later in the near future of 2019, a young girl joins the LDF (Library Defence Force) full of idealistic zeal for protecting literature and a not so altruistic mission of finding the LDF officer who once saved her favourite book for her during in a MBF raid on a bookshop. Politics, romance, action! It’s all here for your edification and enjoyment.

If this all sounds a bit silly, well it is – but only in the best possible way. This is not a film about the evils of censorship, or how intellectual discourse and freedom of information are essential parts of any fully functioning society, though those themes are there if only in passing, so much as a big glossy blockbuster with just about every genre you can think of vying for the spotlight. The creeping totalitarianism is more backdrop than anything else but perhaps the absurdity of anyone picking up arms to defend access to information speaks to our unwillingness to prevent a gradual slide into a world of book burning and (not really) well meaning nannyism. First and foremost, Library Wars is science fiction action film modelled on the familiar boot camp genre following an underdog rookie recruit’s path to frontline glory. Yes we have training montages galore complete with the strained friendships and ‘you’re off the team!’ moments that appear in every film of this kind but the absurd premise and the film’s successful adoption of a warm comic tone help smooth over over any genre clichés and thankfully the film also manages to impress with several large scale battle scenes.

The romantic comedy element is arguably the least successful as it lacks the traditional climax many fans of the genre maybe hoping for (though one suspects a sequel may well put that right). That said the central relationship definitely falls into the ‘cute’ category and cleverly avoids the melodramatic nature of most blockbuster romances. Yes, the audience knows right away who the much sought after prince is but that only makes it more fun even if the post-idealistic bitterness of the man in question is another genre cliché. Supporting characters are also nicely fleshed out and each enjoys a decent amount of time in the spotlight creating a nice ensemble feel which is often rare in a blockbuster. As in Gantz the acting style remains fairly grounded rather the bigger, TV inflected performances which have been creeping into mainstream cinema and the strong performances from a fairly high profile cast help to lift Library Wars above some of its cinematic brethren.

Viewers expecting another Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 will obviously be disappointed in Library Wars’ fairly superficial examination of its themes but those hoping for a rip roaring, if slightly ridiculous, adventure are in line for a treat. Though the subject matter is itself absurd, such care has gone into the world building that it all makes a curious kind of sense assuming you’re willing to let yourself go with it. Most importantly, it’s remarkably self assured in terms of its tone – it knows exactly what it is and isn’t afraid to embrace its own nature. With much more heart than your average blockbuster, Library Wars is a warm and funny action comedy that also manages to be genuinely romantic. Now if they can only hurry up with Library Wars 2 so we can all enjoy the romantic resolution we’ve been waiting for!

Thermae Romae

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Lucius ambulat in Tokyo? Review of improbable time travel comedy Thermae Romae up at UK-anime.net.

Pop quiz – what do modern day Japan and Ancient Rome have in common? Fish sauce? Emperor worship? Sandals? More than you thought, wasn’t it? Well, the correct answer is public bath houses and sure enough the people of modern day Tokyo still love going to the public bath even though they enjoy the luxury of being able to bathe at home! Of course, bath house culture with all its social and political uses and divisions was one of the things the Roman Empire took with it wherever it went. However, there must have been a time when some Romans began to feel their baths were getting a bit stale and in need of a new ‘modern’ twist, but what to do? What if they could leap forward in time and learn from the 21st century bath culture of modern Japan! Enter down on his luck architect Lucius who suddenly finds himself in a strange land full of strange looking people who seem to have taken bath technology to its very zenith.

Lucius Modestus (Hiroshi Abe) is a once successful bath architect with a case of serious designer’s block. Replaced on a prime project because he’s been unable to come up with any ideas he decides to go for a soak at the local bath house but whilst clearing his head underwater he finds himself sucked through a passage way only to reappear in a very strange looking place – it’s a bath house alright, but not as we know it! As they’re speaking a strange language he doesn’t understand, Lucius assumes the elderly men bathing here must be slaves and he’s been sucked into the “slaves only” part of the baths. Some of this stuff is kind of cool though – what are these funny spigot like things for, and these handy little buckets? Wait – they have baskets for their clothes?! We could do with some these in our bit! And so Lucius experiences the wonder of public bathing in Japan to the extent that it makes him cry with joy at which point he returns to Ancient Rome and begins to put some of these techniques to use in his designs. Travelling back and fore, Lucius always seems to run into the same Japanese girl who wants to make him the star of a manga and group of kindly old men. Can Lucius finally build the bath house of his dreams and stop a conspiracy against his beloved Emperor Hadrian at the same time?

Based on Mari Yamazaki’s manga of the same name (which also received an anime treatment from DLE), Thermae Romae sticks fairly closely to a fish out of water format for the the first half of the film as Lucius becomes by turns confused and then entranced by the various pieces of modern bathing technology he encounters on his travels. As a Roman encountering other people who are obviously not Roman, he of course adopts a superior attitude and assumes these people are either slaves or ought to be and so is extremely bewildered that their advancements seem to have eclipsed those of his own beloved Rome. These situations obviously provide a lot of room for humour as Lucius encounters various things that seem perfectly normal to us but strange and alien to him – his pure joy at discovering the wonder of the multifunctional Japanese toilet being particularly notable. It does though become fairly repetitive as Lucius finds himself in different situations which are essentially the same joke in different colours but then when the plot element begins to kick in later in the film it too fails to take off and feels a little too serious when taken with the wacky time travelling antics we began with.

Aided in his quest Lucius meets several amusing supporting characters including the group of elderly men from the baths who didn’t really need the help of an improbable ancient Roman to get themselves in trouble and Mami who functions as a kind of love interest who’s cast Lucius as the hero in her next manga. Mami begins learning about the Roman Empire and takes a course in Latin which helps a lot when she too finds herself in Ancient Rome and facilitates a kind of cross cultural exchange as she steals ideas from Rome for her manga as Lucius stole for the baths. However, the romantic comedy element never really comes together and even as Mami continues to pine over her noble Roman, Lucius remains aloof in the universal belief that all non-Romans are inferior. Though he does come to grudgingly acknowledge that the ‘flat faced people’ as he calls them have particular strengths such as their willingness to work as a team and put collective success ahead of personal gain, he never quite sheds his Roman arrogance.

It’s all very silly but undeniably quite funny if often absurd. We hear everyone in Rome speaking in Japanese and Lucius continues to think in Japanese wherever he actually is but obviously once he gets to Japan he can’t understand what anyone’s saying and attempts to communicate with them in Latin (whilst still giving his interior monologue in Japanese). Likewise, when Mami learns Latin she uses it to communicate with Lucius in Japan but once they get to Rome, all their ‘Latin’ is Japanese too which causes problems when the old men arrive because they’re speaking the same language as everyone else yet can’t understand anyone or be understood – which might be why they don’t get to say very much other than to Mami. It’s all quite strange and disorientating but kind of works as does the largely Puccini based score which screams 19th century Italy much more than Ancient Rome but helps to give the film the air of classical pomposity it’s aiming for. Big, ridiculous, silly fun – no one could accuse Thermae Romae of having any kind of serious message but it does provide genuinely entertaining silliness for the majority of its running time.

 

Room 666

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If you’re Wim Wenders and you’re bored at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, you could amuse yourself by getting a bunch of your director friends to answer a series of pre-set questions about the future of cinema whilst sitting alone (aside from the ever present TV) in front of a static rolling camera in a fairly anonymous hotel room. Luckily, you have a lot of director friends making all sorts of films from all over the world who apparently won’t get that weirded out by sitting alone in an empty room pontificating about the death of cinema as an art form.

This is 1982, the year I was born (though I was born in the winter and Cannes is in the spring so I’m probably on my way somewhere but haven’t quite arrived yet), and this ‘future of cinema’ they’re envisioning is the present in which we now live. It’s depressing how many of the arguments the class of 1982 come up with are the exact same arguments we’re having now – that cinema as an art form has migrated to television and the cinematic output has been reduced to a vague amalgam of the the things Hollywood (in particular) wants it to be. More than one American director, when questioned about his own cinematic habits, admits he rarely watches films himself – he prefers television. In a telling and prophetic fashion, he videotapes films off the TV but then never bothers to watch them. Another recounts the story of friend who’s terrified of this ‘brave new world’ where you’ll be able to buy things through a video camera or, heaven forbid, order a meal from a computer screen! Some are more positive like Werner Herzog who believes the cinema has its own aesthetic which will save it or Antonioni who looks forward to a new age of HD video which is only now coming to pass.

However, aside from the futuristic visions of thirty years ago, it’s almost even more interesting to note how each director chooses to behave inside this strange “diary room”, left all alone except for the silently glaring camera. Jean-Luc Godard is first up – sitting directly facing the camera, smoking in a relaxed fashion and lamenting that his position isn’t the best for seeing the tennis on the TV just beside him. He gets the longest unbroken lecture in which he talks at length about various quite unrelated things until he gets bored and leaves in true Godard fashion – we wouldn’t have him any other way but it’s difficult to tell how seriously he’s taking this. Some directors sit nervously on the edge of the seat, thinking hard about their answers where as others bluster through as though they were at a Hollywood pool party a la Spielberg who laments the weak dollar and the rising cost of filmmaking which he fears will lead to a decline in artistry (which seems kind of ironic). Werner Herzog wins all the prizes for his entrance in which he makes a point of removing his shoes as ‘these aren’t the sort of questions that should be answered with your shoes on’ and being the only director to realise he can turn off the TV behind him! Antonioni gets up and roams around the room as if giving a lecture whereas Rainer Werner Fassbinder (in a late career appearance – he would sadly pass away of a drugs overdose only a few weeks later) gives his answer concisely and leaves almost straight away.

So there we have it, cinema apparently died sometime prior to 1982 and has been subsisting in some kind of bloated zombie state ever since. Art forms are always dying, books died a century ago and yet new ones keep being born which we take to our hearts and minds, nurturing them even though we keep being told there is no hope. The theatre is dead, pop music is dead, classical music and opera? fossilised, perhaps? The presence of the TV set in background is the most ironic use of a TV screen in any movie, just as the directors talk about the threat of television the viewer is constantly distracted by whatever happens to be playing (which includes some kind of Battle of the Planets type thing and Planet of the Apes!) and good old Werner is the only one who thinks to turn it off so we can focus all of our attention on what he has to say. Perhaps the most pressing segment is the one where the director isn’t even present as he’s the subject of an extradition order by the Turkish government but has been able to tape record his contribution prompting Director Wim Wenders to step in front of the camera to explain. This segment highlights how the cinematic art form is still held as a threat and that the true artistic spirit it can exhibit is often suppressed or oppressed by bodies governmental or otherwise. Sadly, this is a problem that has not gone away, nor is it likely to (and unfortunately applies to all art forms equally not just cinema which necessitates higher visibility). Where is the cinema in 2014 then, still trapped like Shrodinger’s cat inside an opaque box where we can’t be certain if it lives or dies? Maybe, it’s making noises every now and then though perhaps it doesn’t sound quite like it used to. The real question though is who wants to save it, and why? Are there people willing to stand up and fight for their art and what exactly is the ‘cinema’ that they want to save?

Watched on Mubi 12th June 2014 (its expiry date). Also available from Anchor Bay in the UK or legal streaming from The Paris Review (among other places).